It's a conundrum that has been flummoxing the world of marketing and PR for years. More often than not, it's the type of question that sends sustainability and communication professionals running to their social media teams and support agencies in search of that magic and elusive SMS: social media solution, not short message service.

Invariably, in an attempt to add the buzz quality to get people to pay attention to the latest dull but worthy initiative, the whizz kids dip into their boxes of digital tricks and produce a social game (everyone loves gamification, right?) or, even better, a crowd-sourced competition.

You can't really blame them. Call it the curse of Pepsi Refresh, but ever since that project demonstrated the conversational power of having online communities vote for socially conscious ideas and schemes, crowd-sourced do-gooderism has been very much the default social media "big idea" for sustainability and corporate social responsibility campaigns.

Which leads us to the new Benetton social media campaign, "Unemployee of the Year", launched last week with much hoopla and not a little social compact gravitas by Alessandro Benetton, the 48-year-old chairman of Benetton Group.

Unemployee is an extension of the clothing retailer's Unhate foundation and awareness campaign, which last year brought us the arresting images of the Pope kissing an imam on the lips. The new campaign has a more concrete goal than simply pissing off the Vatican; it aims to draw attention to, albeit in a small way, the so-called lost generation of 100 million young people worldwide who can't find work. It is a problem acutely felt in some of Benetton's core markets of Italy, Spain and Greece.

The mechanics of Unemployee is an online competition, in which 18 to 30-year-olds are invited to suggest a project that would improve the lives of their communities. The Unemployee community will then vote for their favourite project ideas and the winning 100 will each receive €5,000 from Benetton. (In its voting and reward response, the Benetton campaign is a sort of Pepsi Refresh Lite.) The competition is facilitated through Facebook – you have to get an account with the social network to enter, which gives Benetton a third-party way of verifying the age of contestants and a built-in social tool to build awareness of the competition.

According to Alessandro Benetton, Unemployee is a game changer for a brand that is infamous for its social-cause marketing shock tactics but less well known for putting its money where its mouth is. As he told the New York Times, the campaign "needs to have a practical response to the problems we're raising", adding: "Not by ourselves are we going to change the world … but we want to set an example."

And create a massive marketing buzz for Benetton, of course, complete with a highly stylised YouTube video, plus a plush launch event that grabbed headlines in major news organisations around the world. In fact, according to the New York Times, the total budget for Unemployee of the Year is an estimated €20m.

I have no reason to doubt that Alessandro Benetton's heart and principles are in the right place with his Unemployee idea. In an interview with Reuters, he talks of being inspired by how Japan, and its youth, were able to create a "cleaner economy" despite living through decades of a stagnating national economy. But when so little of your social cause campaign goes to the actual cause you are supporting, surely something is wrong with the execution of the campaign?

I can't help but feel that this smart and, yes, worthy idea got hijacked along the way by that constant bane of sustainability communications – the big campaign mentality. Driven by the need to make a statement, to create the buzz deemed necessary to kickstart the competition, the fundamental values of the Unemployee idea appear to have got lost in the glitz of creating a great campaign.

After all, if you really want to inspire and support a new generation of young people to take a social entrepreneurial approach to life, doling €5,000 is just the first step, no? When Huggies' ran its Moms Inspired competition aimed at getting intellectually frustrated, stay-at-home mothers to create new business ideas, Kimberly-Clark, the parent company, provided business mentoring to bring the plans to fruition. It could be that Benetton is planning something similar but hasn't unveiled it yet. If not, it should do so because, as a recent report on the success and failure of Kickstarter crowd-funded projects demonstrates, getting access to cash is just the first step in bringing good projects to life.

The other component of Huggies' Moms Inspired, that pledged its sustainability rather than CSR credentials, was that the intellectual property created by the project remained with Kimberly-Clark, and the company said it would work with the Moms to bring their ideas to market. In short, Kimberly-Clark was tapping into the entrepreneurial and creative power of its social media community to help that community but also create a stronger Kimblerly-Clark.

This would seem another good example for Benetton as it supports the Unemployee competition. And it also begs the question of how well Benetton is doing at creating its own employment while running this €20 million campaign? On the day Unemployee was launched, there were just three jobs advertised worldwide to work at Benetton.